Dead Wrong

Making official what has been plain to everyone for a long time, a commission has reported on its analysis of US pre-war Iraq intelligence.

"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the commissioners wrote.

One of the most important questions about how intelligence was analyzed is to what extent the administration pressured CIA to draw expected conclusions. In one of my earliest writings (from Feb. 2004) on the web, I said

A vigorous analysis community must pull together these scraps of information, judge the reliability of the information, and arrive at an optimal interpretation. For this to function, the process must be unbiased. Because of the nature of the data, any interpretative bias will inevitably lead to conclusions that conform to the biases. This invalidates the process because we are fitting data to conclusions rather than conclusions to data. Such procedures blind the front line of national security.

Over the last many months, there have been numerous reports of how the administration pressured analysts at CIA and elsewhere to arrive at the "correct", i.e. preconceived, conclusions. If CIA would not cooperate and give the right answers, e.g. in case of the Niger memo, the administration went to other sources (in that case British intelligence) who gave an acceptable interpretation. That one would be considered fact; CIA's dissenting view was considered non-existent.

On this question, the commission concluded

"The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments," the report said.

But the report added: "It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."

But isn't the second statement effectively a contradiction of the first? Just because the administration did not directly tell CIA what to conclude, they did make it clear what conclusions were expected and that deviations from conventional wisdom would not be looked on favorably.

In my workplace last year, I was in a group charged with evaluating software packages that could be bought to provide some required functionality. We explored several different commercial packages as well as the option of building the software in house with the goal of recommending a solution to upper management. Now, no one ever told us what we were supposed to conclude. On the surface, we were free to evaluate everything and recommend the best solution. But everyone knew what the expected results were. We knew there was no interest in building something in house, and that one particular package was preferred and recommending any of the other packages would be a hard sell. That knowledge put pressure on the group to draw the "right" conclusions. Needless to say, the package that upper management wanted all along was deemed best and that was chosen.

Analysts at CIA are pursuing a career. With such pursuits come a desire for attention from on high, for promotions, etc. Against such a backdrop, analysts are not likely to draw conclusions deviating from the expected results. Not only will those analysts not get attention from supervisors and upper management for their work, they would actually be frowned on. When no one wants to hear anything other than the expected result, writing unacceptable conclusions could well damage one's career at CIA. As the LA Times reports, "And when CIA analysts argued after the war that the agency needed to admit it had been duped, they were forced out of their jobs." So, the desire for career advancement and security would pressure the analysts to conclude what was expected.

Again, these expectations do not have to be conveyed explicitly or directly for pressure to be applied. Therefore, the commission's conclusion that dissenting views were not encouraged or sought did apply pressure on CIA "to skew or alter ... their analytical judgments."